I’m always looking for a better price on ingredients I am cooking with. When I lived in Portland, Oregon, I used to drive all around town to four or five different stores just to get the right products for the right prices. I’d go to the produce market, the Japanese market, the seafood store, the health food store, and even all the way out to Beaverton to the Korean and Indian stores. All this just for home cooking. So you can imagine how happy I am now to have found my favorite rose preserves at Sahadi’s on Atlantic Avenue at 65 percent of what I had previously been paying at a spice store in Manhattan. Since I’ve been using the preserves for my rose and black pepper thumbprint cookies, I’ve been using up quite a bit to bake for our Mother’s day gift boxes. I have always loved rose preserves, which is basically just rose petals cooked into a jelly. The flavor and texture of this particular brand, Mymoune, is just right for the cookies - I only have to chop the petals a bit to make it a little neater. These may just become a regular item now that I have found a cheaper source.

We’re trying to figure out some new cookie ideas for our Mother’s Day gift boxes. At the Flea, we sell sampler gift boxes with nice wraparound paper, a ribbon and a stick of cinnamon with small packages of all our products (except marshmallows). We’re planning on slightly different packaging for Mother’s Day and hope to have a special new product inside. Yesterday’s experiments didn’t turn out so great: a chai cheesecake brownie (too much going on), the macaroons (good, but really need to be baked in a professional oven with even heating so they get crispy on the outside) and a rose financier (fancy word for tea cake).

Mark decided to go back to the drawing board and made a rose & black pepper thumbprint cookie. The cookie is a shortbread with a hint of black pepper for some added spice with a rose jam filling. So far, so good. They’re suppose to cool so we can see how the jam firms up, but I snuck a piece while Mark and the girls were at the playground across the street. Hmmmm…I wonder if it needs some more black pepper…hmmm….better taste test one more to see…

A few of you have emailed asking about my basic biscotti recipe. My base recipe is simple enough, so you just need to decide what you want to add - nuts, chocolate chips, dried fruit, etc… One-third of a cup of any of those is enough for this recipe and if you want to experiment with flavored extracts, one teaspoon should suffice.

Basic Biscotti Recipe

1/4 cup butter
6 Tbsp. sugar
1 egg
1 cup flour
3/4 tsp. baking powder
pinch salt

Cream the butter and sugar in an electric mixer. Beat in the egg. Mix in the flour, baking powder and salt until just incorporated. Form into a log about 3-4 inches wide, 1 inch thick, and maybe 10-12 inches long, and bake on a silicone baking sheet at 325 for about 25 minutes, or until completely cooked. Cool and slice diagonally into 1/4 inch slices, then bake again until crisp, 10-12 minutes. Cool completely before eating.

Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, I remember biscotti as being those gigantic funny-shaped cookies in coffee shops that nobody ever bought. I was introduced to a better biscotti when I took my first job in New York as a pastry assistant in an Italian restaurant over 11 years ago. It was there that I found the smaller and more thinly sliced biscotti, served with the traditional accompaniment - a glass of Vin Santo, a sweet Italian dessert wine. Since then I have made biscotti on more than a few occasions, but never had given it much thought until now.

For some reason I had the urge to make a batch the other day. Maybe it was the gray rain that reminded me of back home, but I felt like having something to dip into my fourth cup of coffee. I whipped up a small batch using my basic recipe, plus some coconut, dried mango, and a bit of Chinese five spice powder just for fun. It was very satisfying and perfect for dipping into a hot beverage or snacking on its own, but I think I will omit the mango next time, as its chewiness canceled out some of the biscotti’s crispness. They also seem to be one of the more versatile forms of cookie, in that they can become a vehicle for just about any conceivable flavor…which means that I’ll probably be headed back to the kitchen to try a new flavor soon.

Is it really spring? I do see flowers sprouting out of the two O’s in the Google logo to mark the vernal equinox. Somehow I feel the need to mark the occasion even if I am still wearing my winter jacket when I go outside. I’ve been thinking about cookies a lot lately and trying to perfect my recipes, and I was reminded of a lavender shortbread that I made several years back. On a trip to my favorite spice store, Kaluystan’s, a few weeks ago, I picked up a big bag of dried lavender in anticipation of such an occasion.

In moderation, lavender provides a delicate floral flavor to just about anything, especially desserts. But be careful - use too much and you might feel as if you are eating soap. The best way to incorporate the flavor is just to grind a small amount of dried lavender (fresh is far too overpowering and bitter) into whatever sugar or flour you’re using for your recipe. My cookies turned out just right the first time with no additional testing, saving me both precious time and butter. We like them so much that they may just be one of our regular offerings once this business gets off the ground.

We have new cookie cutters..and a test batch to test out the shape. We like them.

After our marshmallow experiment, we decided not to limit our products to marshmallows so Mark started experimenting with cookies. One of his strengths, I think, is that he can put together some complex, interesting flavors and we didn’t know yet how that would translate over to marshmallows. Our first batch was chocolate shortbread cookies with black sesame - didn’t quite turn out right, though they tasted ok…do you recognize that cookie shape? If you have kids you just might! Yes, that’s the Ikea cookie cutters from the kids’ baking set. Can you believe, that aside from Mia’s toy cookie cutters, we don’t have any real ones in the kitchen??